Seems from the Braz/Indian board thread:
http://www.tokaiforum.com/viewtopic.php?t=10174
that early 850's and up had the MOP. All the 1000 and 1200 is MOP.
What about the Mint's?
Mine certainly has acrylic fret marks.
Are there any Mint's with MOP?
One wonder if it is a cost saving decision or if it was for better replication accuracy.
I think I remember an Ibanez broschure for an LP Custom where they happily stated;Real faux MOP like on the originals...
Maybe MOP is easy to come buy when you live on an island..and why bother with plastic when you can just fish it from the sea?

Hi Villager!
Well I thought I've got the hang of it but since your page is the source of some of the pictures..
I've been experimenting with my camera and I can't get the same reflecting capacity from acryl as from MOP. And it seem's it is also the other way around: I havent seen any MOP pictured om the internet not producing almost mirror like reflekting capacity from ceartin angels and light conditions. Well, I haven't got my MOP guitars around so until I've managed to take a picture of MOP and make it look like acryl a cant be sure.

Villager, i take it from your ansewer that your HB3 has acrylic inlays.
But I would say that your HB2 has acrylic's as well.
They both seperate from any of your 1979-1980 EGF's and instead resembles the look of your Mint Collection guitars, and the pictures I can produce from my acrylic equipped guitar with different light sources.

Thank's for the picture Mark.
I just found out the way to tell for certain what the fret markers are made out of. Acetone is a solvent for acrylic but not for MOP.
Your HB3 has the same unnatural swirl as mine which desolves from acetone so beware if you carry out the test, you may have to polish afterwards..
Since the glue might be desolvable on either fret material I suggest carefullness in testing.

Oh! Capitols, that's convincing.
Not to worry about acetone, does nothing to MOP.
What if I can tell things from a picture that you can't in real life?
It only comes down to resulotion really, dont need no 3D.
Well, you beleive what you want and I'll go on with the investigation for others that might be interested.

So anyhuu.
There's also a different feeling: as the acrylic is plastic it feels "warmer" than the MOP which is more of a stone like feeling, colder that is.
Might even be a difference in tone if you tap it with something

A bit more on the subject: (not my writing)
The most immediately obvious are that usually in plastic there is far too much figure (the intricate and internally-patterned play of light caused by the changes in direction in the grain of the shell), and that it's too evenly dispersed over the entire expanse of large pieces. Most of a raw natural pearl oyster shell is almost entirely plain or unfigured out on its large flat surface . The natural figure is also not just randomly swirled or marbled, and does not occur in large curved arcs or have pointy geometric shapes, as seen in the plastics, but instead contains distinctively characteristic patterns such as slightly radiating fan-like fingers, bumpy-looking cloud-like figure, or fine little hammered-metal looking dimples with rather sharply defined edges to each dimple.

your mint collection may well be acrylic, but since its not actuAlly in front of me in real life, prefer not to judge what I haven't seen...

You should be able to tell from a good picture.
This is acrylic a.k.a Mother Of Toiletseat:
Until I've seen a picture like that of HB2/3 I have to judge from the low resulotion ones I have and they dont look anything like MOP.
You may believe what you want. If you want to convince me, produce photographs. I still don't say they aren't MOP they only don't look anything like it in the pictures. Well, they acually look like acrylic.

all have red and blue in the colour spectrum but the 2 you mention look very different...still not 100% convinced what they are....but if I had to bet I would bet acrylic...but all the other acrylic , all the OBG and majority tokai, have no red or blue tinges at all...thats whats puzzling me...

so my apologies, ..I actually looked at the wrong superreal 1200..

I am ashamed...

your neck has a superreal logo, and looks like acrylic markers, so therefore its certain that some superreal necks had acrylic markers in them,_________________http://www.japanguitars.co.uk

Last edited by villager on Tue Feb 19, 2008 6:14 am; edited 4 times in total